My Pack Cut Me Off, So I Reported to the Lycan King novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Ceremony Was Mine
Rejected before four hundred wolves, cut from the pack link by her own family, Brinley spends a year as a ghost and finally drives out with the headlights off. At the pines a black wolf sits in the road, and her silent wolf stands up.
Brant Colter rejected me in front of four hundred wolves, and my father didn't say a word.
It was my twenty-first birthday and my mating ceremony, on the same night, under a full moon.
My mother had spent four months on it.
Midnight blue and silver, because I hate pink.
White moonflowers, and my grandmother's silver chalice on the altar stone.
Brant stepped into the circle in his dark jacket, the boy I had loved since I was sixteen.
He was the one who carried my bag in from the truck every summer and laughed at my terrible singing.
His hands were shaking, and I thought it was nerves.
He smiled at me across the grass.
Then he said it loud enough for the back rows to hear.
"I, Brant Colter, reject Brinley Ludlow as my mate and my Luna. I've found someone worth more."
The bond snapped inside my chest, and something in me tore loose at the root.
I didn't scream.
I stood there in my blue dress and made no sound at all.
I looked at my father, the Alpha, who can put a whole room on its knees with a single order.
He looked back at me and said nothing.
My mother looked at the floor of the clearing.
My five brothers stood in a line with their hands at their sides, the same brothers who once put a boy through a fence for grabbing my arm at a bonfire.
Brant walked out between them, breathing.
Later that night my father, Alpha Gregory Ludlow, stopped outside my bedroom door.
"Go to sleep, Brinley," he said. "This will look different in the morning."
It did look different.
I woke up and reached for the pack link, the way I had every morning of my life.
My head was empty.
My mother's good morning was gone, and so were my brothers' stupid jokes and my father's low hum under everything.
I went down to the kitchen.
My mother, Hester, stood at the sink with her back to me.
"Morning, Mom," I said.
She rinsed a cup and set it on the rack.
I walked to the front gate and pressed my palm to the ward stone that had known my blood my whole life.
It stayed dark.
They had re-keyed the wards overnight, and every wolf's blood opened that gate except mine.
A wolf with no pack link is supposed to go mad within a year.
Everybody knows that, and my family knew it better than anyone.
So for a year I lived in my father's house and nobody answered me.
They set my place at the table and stepped around me in the halls.
A person nobody looks at sees everything.
I learned which trail has no camera, because my second brother put the cameras up and never once checked them.
I learned every patrol shift on our land.
I learned the minute the north sentry shifts back to human to smoke.
I should have gone mad by month six.
I never did.
Every night a low warmth sat in my chest and let me sleep.
I told myself I was just stubborn.
Eleven days ago a black envelope came to a post office box my family doesn't know exists.
The card inside had a silver crescent moon stamped on it, the seal of the Lycan King.
Applicant J. Rowe: accepted. Report to Vane Tower, Manhattan. Tell no one.
I had applied under my mother's maiden name, and I had told no one.
Tonight I packed one suitcase.
I waited until the whole house was lit up and busy with itself.
I rolled my old truck down the gravel drive with the headlights off.
I took the trail with no camera.
I passed the north sentry the minute he was bent over his cigarette with his back to the road.
At the edge of our land, where the pines stop and the highway starts, I put the truck in park and looked back.
Twenty-two windows, every one of them lit.
Not one of them was looking for me.
"Bye," I said to the glass. "Nobody here will miss me, and I'm going to miss all of you anyway."
I wasn't running away.
I had somewhere to be.
By sunrise my room would sit empty, and I was sure it would take them eleven days to notice.
I turned the key and pulled onto the highway.
I didn't look in the mirror again.
A mile on, my headlights found something sitting in the middle of the road.
It was a wolf.
It was black, and bigger than any wolf I had ever seen, with its shoulders level with my hood.
It didn't move out of the way.
I stopped the truck and sat there with both hands on the wheel.
The wolf looked straight through the windshield at me.
Inside my chest, where nothing had stirred for a year, my own wolf stood up.
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